Some questions that we are exploring:
Is the student a pawn in the game of learning?
When do stakeholders have the student’s interest in mind?
When do other forces/motivations cause them to make decisions that do not support student learning?
When do learners feel empowered?
What is the ideal learning experience? The ideal student? The ideal setting? The ideal tools? The ideal support structure?
How does our vision of the future interact with these ideals?
What do our ideals reveal about the limits of our own experience and our biases?
How do we get people to think concretely and provocative?
How can we engage a group in the larger conversation about learning through game design (prototyping, playtesting, critiquing)?
How can we create a game that itself includes elements of game design, and thus embodies the conversation?

We are planning three workshops:
1. Data and Artifact Generation: Conversation and Collaborative Art-Making about the learning experiences of the past, present and future.
2. Rapid Game Prototyping: Employing concepts from theatre, creating compositions of game mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics.
3. Playtesting the Game: playtesting the resulting game and debriefing the game and the experience.

Judy and I are trying to organize a workshop for this week as the first step to designing a speculative game around education. We would like to invite you all to participate. The only requirements are that you have experience being a student (which everyone has!) and that you are willing to donate two hours of your time sharing stories and doing crafts around educational topics.

We would like to find a time that will work well for everyone. If you would like to participate, please fill out our doodle poll (http://doodle.com/ttfyksndukhsxusx) by 1:30 Tuesday and we will find a time that works best for the most people. We know time is precious, so do not feel obligated to come if you cannot or are not interested. We are hoping this will be a fun time!

I have decided to explore my doctoral research topic through this project and it would be a good opportunity to start working on exploring my thesis.

I am interested in future visions for frugal conditions. How could the visions for disruptve future be created? What are the alternatives where we can imagine ‘our collective future’ and not a sleek and shiny coroporate vision for the future.

Creativity happens at every level. People design and innovate in every possible living condition in the world. Design and Innovation have been colonized to the tunes of western domination. I want to imagine the decolonization of critical design and imagine a future vision for people in places like China, India, Phillipines…etc.

My inquiry is – What are the maker cultures that will affect our futures and what futures are possible by using existing innovation frameworks in resource lacking conditions ?

What it looks like when third world countries try to do speculative critical design ?

Do they follow the aestheticized highly crafted approach of creating speculating artifacts or do they create their own design language? what would it look like ? how can we potray that wthout being discriminating and how do we avoid further marginalizing them?

Currently, food homogenization is a common problem . Certain plants are bred to grow faster and to grow more, causing a decrease in nutrients in the soil and a strong dependency on certain crops. Livestock is bred in close quarters, and swine flu, bird flu, mad cow’s disease, seems to pop up in the media regularly causing spurts of public outcry. What happens if the world is so affected by homogenization that all animals are sick and inedible? How do humans adapt to this, and where are they willing to go in order to have a sufficient source of protein?